


Not How the Song Goes

by sadlikeknives



Category: Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Pre-Canon, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-01-20 03:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12424203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: Kyle and Warren, from the beginning to the end of the beginning.





	Not How the Song Goes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brilligspoons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brilligspoons/gifts).



The very first thing Kyle noticed about Warren Smith was his voice.

He'd been standing with Geordi and Alex in a corner of Brad Forrester's backyard nearest the table where the bar had been set up, trying to get drunk as recompense for being stuck at this party when they all knew throwing your own birthday party was tacky and he didn't even like Brad that much anyway, social pressures be damned, when somewhere across the yard, a Texan had said—something. He didn't even remember what, looking back, just the accent, that drawl like honey rarely heard in the Tri-Cities, and a voice that felt...strong, somehow. Like the person who had it was rock steady. He'd looked over, following it back to his source, and _hello_. "Who's the tall drink of water in the—are those cowboy boots?" Not that unusual for this area, but combined with the accent, he really must be Texan.

The shirt, he thought, was a crime, but that was just the _right_ amount of stubble.

"Warren Smith. He's from Texas," Alex confirmed. "I think he used to date Matt."

"Oh, good," Kyle said dryly, raising his drink to his mouth. The bourbon was substandard, but any port in a storm. "We have something in common." The incestuousness of the gay dating scene in a metropolitan area the size of the Tri-Cities was unfortunate, but unavoidable. Matt, he believed, was dating some guy from Tacoma now. He wished Tacoma joy of him, dubious as he in retrospect found the prospect of Matt bringing anyone joy. "Continue," he demanded.

"I really don't know anything else about his relationship with Matt."

"I will throw this drink in your face, Alex." Alex laughed, but Kyle had been about half serious. He obviously didn't want to talk about his _previous_ relationships here. "Is he really a cowboy? Do we have cows here? I thought we just had cherries. And decent wine."

"You snob."

"I said the wine was decent!"

"He used to be a cowboy," Geordi supplied. Kyle nodded, sage, like this information did not matter one way or another, even if he was thinking, _Hot_ , and, vaguely, something about chaps. "I heard that somewhere. Now he works at a gas station out in Finley." Kyle didn't know enough about the reality of cowboydom to know if that was a lateral career move, a step down, or an improvement. Certainly it lacked some of the romance of his former profession, but one did what they had to to keep a roof over their head, and plenty of gay men had gotten screwed over hard by life at one point or another, without Kyle's advantages to fall back on. A job was a job.

He wondered why he'd moved to an area where he'd have to switch careers, and that was when he knew he was in trouble. Kyle's curiosity was a dangerous thing.

"Gonna ask the cowboy if he wants a ride?" Geordi teased, and Kyle looked across the yard to where Warren Smith's gaze had just fallen on him and stuck, as if he knew they were talking about him. His eyes were brown, Kyle noticed, and warm.

"Don't be vulgar," Kyle said, as if such a thing were possible. "And I don't believe that's how that song goes. Anyway, I'm going to offer to buy him dinner first." He tossed the last over his shoulder, already starting across the yard to where he got the oddest sense Warren Smith from Texas was already waiting for him.

"Ask him about his lasso!"

"Not my style!"

"What's not your style?" Warren Smith asked him, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes suggesting he had, in fact, heard Alex. Alex hadn't exactly been quiet, after all. But Kyle could work with that.

He shifted his posture to something more flirtatious and asked, "Wouldn't _you_ like to find out?"

"Well, now," Warren said, the Texas dripping off his voice, his body language and the heat in his eyes answering Kyle's. "Suppose maybe I would." 

They didn't make it to dinner first, but that was fine. They would just have to go out to dinner later.

There was a moment just inside the door of Kyle's house when he thought the whole thing was going to fall apart on him, when Warren just—stopped. His face went carefully blank, and Kyle's heart swooped, and then he followed Warren's gaze and he understood that Warren was not, in fact, having an internal crisis over Kyle being rich. He might have one later, sure, but his concerns were of a different nature at the moment. "Ah," Kyle said. "I should introduce you. This is Dick, and this is Jane." Jane was wearing a tutu and an obnoxiously chartreuse bikini top; Dick sported only a top hat, and not on his head. It would have been wasted on his head. Kyle was considering giving him a bow tie, but he was afraid that was a little _too_ Chippendale when he did, after all, sometimes have children in this house. "They came with the house and I'm making the best of it," he explained, before adding in the spirit of full disclosure, "Or they're the entire ridiculous reason I bought this house in the first place. I really couldn't tell you which."

The corner of Warren's mouth turned up, and he declared, "I like them." Then he slid the long fingers of one hand against Kyle's jaw and kissed him again, and Kyle forgot to worry about anything for quite some time.

***

Warren did not, in truth, expect Kyle Brooks to ever take him out to dinner, no matter what he'd heard him tell his friends at Forrester's party. In his experience, guys in shoes that expensive didn't typically have anything in mind beyond breakfast the next morning when they hit on him, or if they did, it was more along the lines of, 'Don't call me, I'll booty call you.' He'd been fine with that sort of thing, now and again, but it wasn't really where he was these days, so he'd assumed it would be a one night stand and done, even when he exchanged numbers with Kyle.

When Kyle did call and asked if he liked steak, he was so surprised he asked, "Wait, are you serious?" and then kicked himself.

"Is that a no?"

"I like steak more than I like most people," Warren said, which was more true than Kyle could know, and he managed to paper over his previous response that way, by letting Kyle think it had been a joke.

"Oh," Kyle said, "well, good, and in that case, what are you doing Friday night?"

"Working," Warren had to admit. "A double. Usually I work the graveyard shift." He was happy to do it, too. The night shift was when, if anything stupid was going to happen, it usually did, and better him than one of the human employees. "I usually get Wednesdays off, though," he offered.

"I can do Wednesday," Kyle said, and Warren swore he could hear his smile over the phone.

Toward the end of Kyle and Warren's first actual date, Kyle explained that they couldn't go back to his house, because he had people there. Warren wasn't sure what his face did, then, because Kyle hastily explained that he had a client and her kids staying there, at least until the restraining order came through. Warren blinked, and suddenly Kyle's giant house, far too big for any one man, made sense. The wolf in the back of his head thought something like, _like a pack house_ , and something like, _protects people_ , and Warren would realize later that that was the moment he and his wolf got on the same page, the moment he went all in on Kyle Brooks.

They made out on Warren's couch for a while, until Kyle made to pull away and Warren asked him, sure he sounded plaintive, "Are you sure you can't stay?"

"I don't really want to leave Danielle and her kids alone all night in an unfamiliar house," Kyle said apologetically. "Next time, though. I have plans for you."

"Oh, good," Warren said, husky, to both the idea of next time and the idea of Kyle having plans for him, and Kyle's eyes went dark and he kissed him again.

Weeks later, the second time Kyle slept over at Warren's house, Darryl called in the middle of the night. Warren was actually still awake, lying there staring at the ceiling. It used to be he could sleep anywhere, any time, and snap back awake in an instant, but the last few years he'd been easing down from the awful state of hypervigilance he'd had to live in as a lone wolf, and working the night shift while having a social life with someone who kept daylight hours was fucking with his brain. It would all work out eventually.

His phone's vibration setting went off just before the actual ringtone, and in that instant he grabbed it and hit talk, so it wouldn't wake Kyle, who was sleeping the sleep of the well-fucked beside him.

"Yeah," he said softly.

"There's some wolf in Pasco, or was," Darryl said. "George says he got a whiff of him at the Motel 6 while he was breaking up a domestic or something. You need to go check it out."

 _Waste of time_ , Warren thought. Not checking it out, that needed to be done, but making him do it. He knew how it would've gone: George couldn't follow up while he was on duty, so he'd called it in to Adam, who'd delegated to Darryl, because Darryl was closer, and because the Alpha shouldn't need to check out some random lone wolf in person. But Darryl, instead of just _doing_ it, had kicked it down the line, because Darryl kept yanking Warren's chain to see if he'd snap back one of these days. And that was absolutely not an option, not if Warren wanted to be able to remain a member of this pack—and he wanted that, wanted to stay in the Tri-Cities and not to go back to being alone, with an unmatchable desperation. They wouldn't have him as second. So he just said, "Yeah. I'll take care of it."

Kyle woke up while he was getting dressed, just enough to make a questioning sort of mumble, which was thoroughly charming. The only part of it that was the least bit intelligible was 'baby,' which no one had called Warren in years. He didn't really give off the vibe of being anyone's baby.

He kind of liked it.

"Problem at the store," Warren lied easily. "It's fine, it won't take long, I'll be back." Unless he actually found a trail or the loner, and the loner was keen on trouble, he thought. But he'd do his best to make it true. He kissed Kyle, quick and featherlight, and told him, "Go back to sleep."

The errand was simple that night: the loner was staying in the hotel and just passing through, apologetically explaining he didn't know Adam's phone number to check in. He was the jittery, hungry kind of loner, the kind Warren didn't trust and would be relieved to see leave town, but he was telling the truth and ready enough to show his throat to a bigger wolf, so he wasn't particularly a problem. Warren called it in to Adam, gave him the guy's name, room number, and promise to be out of there the next morning, and went home.

Kyle was waiting for him, warm and pliant, and it was so good to just wind himself around him and drop down into sleep, to wake at the sound of his phone's alarm in the morning and make out for a bit before Kyle declared that, "No, I really do have to get up, Angelina never forgives anyone for being late."

Warren let his hand slide down to Kyle's ass, which was as spectacular as the rest of him. "Not even a little late?" he asked, plaintive, and Kyle laughed at him and scrambled out of the bed, heading for the bathroom. Warren took a moment to watch him go before he got up to make coffee, finding that he kept smiling. He could get used to this, he thought.

He wasn't naive. Even then he knew that it couldn't possibly end well. But he intended to keep it while he could.

He met up with Adam for lunch one day a while after that. Adam had instituted the practice when Warren was still pretty new in the pack, when he'd realized exactly how badly he'd tossed him in the deep end in the process of very carefully and precisely placing him in the only position in the pack he could possibly occupy. Warren had gone from mostly avoiding other werewolves, most of his encounters with others of his kind brief and violent, to third in the pack, and it had been bumpy. He hadn’t known the first thing about how to be in a pack, never mind near the top of it. He'd picked up a lot through observation, but there were still issues, and Adam wanted his pack to run smoothly, so he wanted to help. Of course, then he and Adam had figured out that they clicked (and that their accents tended to feed off each other until they alarmed the Yankees), and now the lunches were more just friends meeting up than anything else, but sometimes Warren still had questions. And sometimes he just desperately wanted to say, "Can you call Darryl off already, because this is getting ridiculous," but that, he couldn't do.

"So how's—Jack? Was it Jack? Jake. Jay." Warren just looked amused at him until Adam said, rueful, "Please tell me it at least starts with a J."

"It was Jake," Warren told him, "and we broke up nearly six months ago. Don't know where you were. It's Kyle now. It's been Kyle for...a while," he realized. Time seemed to fly by. "Couple of months. Man's got more stuff in my shower than I do." Like that was hard.

"Yeah?" Adam asked. "What's Kyle like?"

What was Kyle like? _Amazing_ , Warren thought, but he was not going to be that sappy in public. "Uh, knife-sharp and impeccably put together. He's a lawyer," he explained. "Tiny and vain as hell. Back in my day they would've called him a dandy, I suppose. Now you'd probably call him a bit of a queen."

"Well," Adam said. " _I_ probably wouldn't."

"No. You probably wouldn't." Adam was careful about words like that. Warren respected that about him. He paused, took a sip of his water, and admitted, "I'm kind of into it." It was true, of course, or Adam would have noticed, but he said it mostly to see what Adam would do with it. Maybe Kyle was rubbing off on him.

Adam’s brow furrowed. “The tininess or the—uh, the vanity?”

“Yes.”

Adam nodded as if that made sense, ate a tortilla chip, and said, "So when you say 'tiny...'"

Warren considered it. "I reckon he and Mercy could swap clothes without too much trouble." Except Kyle wouldn't be caught dead in anything with a grease stain and Mercy would break out in hives if she knew how much Kyle's shirts cost. And yet they'd met, and they got along. Their senses of humor were terrifyingly compatible. Go figure.

"Mercy's not tiny, though," Adam said, and as Warren's shoulders shook with repressed laughter, he pointed a chip at him and said, "No, don't you dig me that hole, old man. I'm digging it deep enough myself."

"Just ask her out sometime," Warren said. "'Hey, Mercy, maybe you'd like to get dinner.'" Adam gave him an exasperated look, and Warren amended that to, "'Hey, Mercy, I feel like maybe we've gotten off on the wrong page some. Maybe we can start over. Over dinner.'"

"It's never gonna work."

"It's never gonna work if you don't ever ask her out, that's for damned sure," Warren agreed.

"Drop it," Adam snarled, and Warren couldn't disobey an order from his Alpha, so he dropped it. "Can't we talk about your Kyle some more?"

"What's there to talk about?" Warren asked, feeling suddenly weary. Maybe it was contemplating the mess that was Adam's love life that had done it to him. "He's human. It's going to end badly."

"You don't know that."

"Yeah, I do." He looped back around to change the subject, and to officially let Adam off the hook. "No, Mercy's...normal size for a woman, I guess. But Kyle's not a woman."

"I sort of guessed that from how you're sleeping with him," Adam said dryly, and Warren laughed.

"All right, he's not _that_ small," he allowed. He was just smaller than Warren, or at least shorter, but then most men were: Warren was kind of a beanpole.

"And it sounds like he's moving into your house."

"It's not—I don't know. He's got a really nice place up in West Richland." Warren shrugged. "Lawyer. Divorce lawyer, did I mention that?"

"You did not."

"Yeah, well. Ivy League, even."

Adam studied him critically for a moment, then said, "You're really gone on this guy, aren't you?"

"Might be," Warren admitted.

"Well, I definitely can't invite him to my house."

"God, no," Warren agreed readily. "Paul might be there." He only barely didn't strangle Paul on most occasions; if he said something to Kyle, God help them all.

Not that Kyle needed Warren to deal with homophobes for him, but still.

"You can come to dinner sometime," Warren allowed. Maybe he'd invite Mercy, too. That would provide him and Kyle with entertainment, if nothing else. And then their food was arriving, and the two hungry werewolves dropped the conversation for a while in favor of it.

Eventually, Warren had gathered up enough nerve to say, "Say I wanted to go to Seattle sometime." Other members of the pack went to Seattle pretty regularly—for work, for shopping, for cultural things. Other members of the pack weren't Warren.

"What's in Seattle?" Adam asked.

"Beyonce concert."

Adam was so startled he put down his fork sharply, his brow furrowing in concern. "You're not going to a _Beyonce_ concert—"

"No," Warren agreed quickly. "Absolutely not, no." A Beyonce concert was, between the crowds, the noise, and the lighting and possible pyrotechnics, almost a perfectly designed werewolf hell. "Kyle is. He's already got the ticket. He knows I won't go to the actual concert. He thinks I have some kind of ear thing that means I can't do the loud music."

"That's more or less the truth, anyway."

"Yeah. But he was making noises about making a weekend of it. It's not for a couple of months yet, we might have even split up by then, who knows, but...I thought I'd do better to ask now." It would be pretty close to their six month anniversary, if they made it that far. "In October."

Adam nodded and picked his fork back up. "Just call Angus, when it gets closer to time, and let him know when you'll be there. I'll get you his number. And if he gives you any trouble, let me know, and _I'll_ call Angus."

"Thank you," Warren said, meaning it from the bottom of his heart.

"Just doing my job."

Everything was going well. Warren, who’d had to start over more times than he could count, couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all going to go down in flames eventually, but in the moment, his life was about how he wanted it it to be.

***

Warren was waiting when Kyle finally ushered Helen Reed out of his office, feet crossed at the ankles, shoulders relaxed. "Sorry you had to wait," Kyle said when Helen had been shown out the door. The problem with all your clients being in the middle of a divorce was that all their emergencies were very dramatic and very _right now_ ; he'd just spent an hour, the better part of which had been scheduled for lunch with Warren, losing a client because her husband swore he'd changed, and was definitely not going to cheat on her again.

Kyle really didn't understand the tendency of people to want to believe someone again, once they'd proven themselves to be a liar. The odds were about even whether he'd see Helen in his office again, newly enraged and as shocked as the first time, within a year.

"It's fine," Warren said easily. "I don't mind waiting for you." He just _said_ things like that. It was really unfair. "Do you still have time for lunch?"

Most of his afternoon wasn't meetings, so he did. He wasn't the greatest of company, though, and he knew it—he spent most of the time bitching about how cheaters never changed, how someone who'd lied to you once would do it again. But Warren just listened patiently.

Eventually, he surfaced from his rant to notice something. "That guy keeps looking at you." That guy kept shooting _daggers_ at Warren, actually. Tall, blond hair, red beard. Kyle didn't know him.

"Mm-hmm," Warren agreed. Kyle hadn't noticed him even looking in the guy's direction, but he'd been distracted. "That's Paul. We know each other through Adam. Don't worry about it."

"I'm kind of worried about it. He doesn't seem to like you much."

"I have the audacity to be gay in public, so." Warren shrugged.

"No," Kyle gasped, pressing one hand to his heart as if in shock. "You're _gay_? Next you'll tell me this is not just a friendly business lunch!" Warren snickered, and Kyle more or less forgot about the guy until after the check had come, and with it the usual brief argument about who was paying—Kyle won, because he'd been the one to ask Warren to lunch and the one to make them late. As they were heading back to Kyle's office, he finally had to ask, "Adam's friends with a homophobe?" That was unfortunate. He liked Adam. He seemed a little uptight, but he was ex-military and ran a security company, so that was probably to be expected. Mercy had issues with him that went beyond the typical neighbor stuff, but reading between the lines Kyle thought that had at least a little to do with unresolved sexual tension. Warren, though, talked about Adam Hauptman like he'd hung the moon.

"I don't know if he knew he was a homophobe until I came along," Warren allowed. "It's pretty easy for straight guys to miss things like that, you know. Adam was a Ranger, and Paul used to be in the army, I heard, so I figure they know each other somehow through that? It's...whatever. I don’t know that I’d really call them friends." Sometimes Kyle wondered if it was growing up in Texas that gave Warren a higher asshole tolerance than he personally had, but then he usually wondered either if he was stereotyping Texans or if it was that his own personal tolerance for assholes was very low and informed by his staggering amounts of privilege. Or possibly both.

When they got back to the office, Angelina said something to Warren that made him laugh, and once he'd gone, Kyle asked, "What was that about, hmmm?" All the years he'd spent studying Latin sometimes bit him in the ass. He really should at least make an attempt to learn Spanish. It would be useful. Especially if his boyfriend and his mildly terrifying office manager were going to talk about him in it.

"We got to know each other while you were in with Mrs. Reed." Oh God. The horror. "You know your young man is from Texas?" Angelina asked him.

"Yes, Angelina, I did know that." It was the first thing he'd ever known about him.

"Hmm. He speaks good Spanish. A little strange, though."

"Strange how?"

Angelina made a vague gesture. "Some of the words he uses are really old-fashioned. Like he learned his Spanish from someone's grandmother." Actually, Kyle was pretty sure Warren had mentioned once that he'd learned most of his Spanish during his cowboy years—which, when he put it like that, made it sound like he'd worked the range for a lot longer than he really could have, considering he wasn't thirty yet—from _vaqueros_ who spoke it as their first language. "Maybe things are different in Texas," Angelina mused. Then she slanted an annoyed look Kyle's way and said, "But you can barely order a taco, _mijo_ , what would you know?"

"And that's my cue to flee," Kyle announced loudly, to amuse her and the weary-looking woman waiting to see Howard, and took himself off to spend the rest of the afternoon working on filings and getting ready for the hearing he had the next day.

So Warren's Spanish was old-fashioned. There were a lot of things about Warren that were a little old-fashioned, actually. He had a whole rant about the state of modern country music Kyle occasionally triggered on purpose, for the sheer pleasure of listening to Warren being that passionate about something. A lot of it, like how courteous he was of his partner—a charming change from some of Kyle's previous boyfriends—Kyle chalked up to his being Texan, although he was pretty sure most Texans were fine with the existence of bro country. It was all just part of the puzzle that was Warren.

The thing was, and it wasn't enough to really bother Kyle yet, but it was starting to get to that point—he was beginning to feel like the puzzle was a lot bigger than he'd thought it was.

***

The moon set at around four AM, and a lot of the pack opted to go back to Adam's house, get a little sleep and maybe a shower before attempting to start the day, but Warren just wanted to get home. He couldn't remember what he'd told Kyle he was doing. If he thought he was working he was probably going to be confused, but Warren still had the moon singing through his veins too much to really care.

It had been a good full moon. The hunt had been good, a nice, long run under the moonlight. Warren had caught a nice plump rabbit, and even if he hadn't, he would never discount how good it was just to spend the moon with a pack, _his_ pack. And before the hunt, before they'd all changed, he'd gotten to dress Paul down—for acting weird in front of the human, if not for being a homophobic jackass—and Paul had had no choice but to take it, because he had, in fact, been weird in front of the human and he did, in fact, know better.

Honey had said something once—they'd been in her and Peter's barn, which he'd spent a lot of time in when he was new in the pack. Not only were Honey and Peter two of the only members of the pack who'd accepted him and _liked_ him first thing, Peter was happy to let him help out with the horses, which was something Warren had been missing. They'd been talking about Paul, and Warren's increasing annoyance that he wouldn't just challenge him already so Warren could kick his ass and have done with it. Honey had said, "Paul's wolf is a lot smarter than Paul is, is the thing."

"Hmm," Peter had said from inside one of the stalls. "Yes. He'll challenge you eventually, because he's Paul," he had continued, "but he's going to try to wait until you're already wounded, because he has no concept of why that's a _worse_ idea." Warren had fought injured plenty of times. That was when people usually wound up dying, because he didn't have the luxury of leaving them alive and keeping himself alive at the same time. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that with Paul. He served a useful function in the pack.

"Because it worked last time," Honey had called to him, then explained to Warren, "He did it to George, back in New Mexico—he'd gotten shot. So we're standing around arguing about whether to cut the bullet out or let it fester itself out, and then out of the blue Paul calls challenge."

"This would've been for...fourth, right?" Warren had had to check. He was pretty sure George had never made it up to third, that that had been a guy named Jose until the pack moved and he opted to stay behind with his family in New Mexico, be part of the new, smaller Los Alamos Pack. Then, of course, it had been Paul until Adam invited Warren into the pack.

"Right. It was foolish," Peter had said. "In so many ways. He won, but it damaged his standing in the eyes of a lot of the pack. Made it hard to respect him. And he probably could have beaten George fair, or George would have returned the challenge by now. So there was no need for tricks. And he learned nothing and he'll do it again."

So that was Paul. He could resent Warren and he could push, and that was one thing—Warren was a big enough wolf not to care, and had become jaded toward casual homophobia several decades ago. At least now it was all out in the open, and most people agreed it wasn't right. But he couldn't accept him causing trouble with Kyle, and that he'd done it in public had given Warren an opening he'd been pleased to take. It wouldn't happen again.

Kyle woke when he came in, saying his name sleepily, and Warren confirmed, "It's me."

"Thought you were at work."

"Mike took over. He needs the hours." This was true, it was just that Mike had taken over at the start of the shift, because Warren had been getting ready to have four legs at that point in time—not that Mike knew that either. He finished shedding his clothes and climbed onto the bed, kissing Kyle deeply before burying his face in the side of his neck. "Mmm, you smell _good_." He thought about biting Kyle with his blunt human teeth, leaving a mark on him for all the world to see that he was _his_. The human side of his brain knew that Kyle would murder him if he left a mark that showed over the collar of his suit. The wolf didn't care.

"What's gotten into you?" Kyle asked, one hand coming up to cup the back of Warren's head, the other skimming down his side to the top of his ass. "I'm not complaining. It's just..."

"Must be the moon," Warren muttered, his lips against Kyle's pulse. "It was full tonight."

"Is it? I never notice that kind of thing." How strange. Warren supposed he must have been like that once, too—although it was different back then, when light at night wasn't easy to come by. But now he felt like his life had always been ruled by the moon, that he had always known its cycle in his blood and in his bones.

Warren kissed down Kyle's neck to his collarbone, to his chest, and admitted, "I've been thinkin' about you all night. About how good it was gonna be when I was fuckin' you."

Kyle gasped like Warren's words had gone right through him, his pulse picking up, his arousal delicious on the air. "You can't just _say_ things like that," he protested. "I mean, you can. Please do. But _Jesus_."

Warren chuckled against Kyle's ribcage, letting it thrum through him, and asked, "So, can I?"

"Fuck me?"

"Yeah."

"As if you have to ask."

"Well. I like to be gentlemanly."

Kyle twisted out from under him and dove for the drawer in the nightstand, which was its own kind of yes. Warren took the opportunity to sneak a peek at the mirror over the dresser, and his wolf's yellow eyes looked back at him in the first grey light of dawn. Fuck. It wasn't quite a bucket of cold water, nowhere near enough to douse the fire of his desire, but it meant he had to think, had to be careful. He could keep Kyle from seeing until he could get him on his hands and knees, at least, even if that wasn't quite how he wanted him, even if he wanted to see his beautiful face. It would still be so, so good.

It was second nature by now, how to make love to a man and never let him see his eyes. Most of the time he had better control than that, but around the moon was never a sure thing. He kissed Kyle again when he came back with the lube and condom—Kyle was cautious, insisted on them until enough tests came back clean, and Warren couldn't tell him there was nothing he could possibly give him, and had lived through the nightmare of the height of the AIDS epidemic besides. There had been a period where no one had known yet if it would be the thing that finally managed to jump the species barrier, when Warren could only describe his base emotional state as 'pure throat-gripping dread.' He'd happily agree to any precautions his partner wanted to take.

He worked his way down Kyle's body slow, taking his time, careful to keep his eyes closed. One wet kiss to the head of his cock and he moved on, earning him a gasped, "Tease," before he got to where he was going. He opened him up with fingers and tongue, taking his time, reveling in the sounds he made and the heady scent and taste of him. When he was ready, Warren asked him, "You wanna turn over for me?"

"Yeah," Kyle said, his voice a little shaky. "Yeah, okay." Warren slid into him with a groan, and Kyle asked, sounding a little smug, as if he'd done something to be smug about—which Warren guessed he had, just by existing—"Yeah?"

"You feel so good," Warren told him roughly, fucking into him with little sharp thrusts, getting deeper as he found his rhythm. He didn't last long, the wolf and the moon singing through him too much for stamina, and he sank his teeth deep into Kyle's shoulder as he came. As he came down he looked over toward the dresser again, waiting until his eyes finished bleeding back to brown to pull out and throw the condom somewhere to deal with later. Then he flipped Kyle back over and swallowed his cock down.

Kyle shouted, "God!" and twisted under his hands. Warren rode it out and went to work. Kyle came in just a few minutes, salty and bitter and perfect across his tongue, and Warren flopped down beside him, touching his fingertips gently to his shoulder.

"That's gonna bruise."

Kyle butted his head gently against his cheek, his sweaty hair sliding against Warren's skin. "Well, you don't have to sound so happy about it."

"I was aimin' for apologetic."

"Mm-hmm. ‘Course you were. I don’t mind. You sound real Texan right now."

"Do I?" Warren asked. It was the wolf, he thought. Though he was pretty tired, he wasn't exhausted enough for it to be that, and those were the only things that really brought it out in full anymore, short of him turning it on on purpose or talking to someone from Houston. He'd been away from home for a long time.

"All your g's are gone. It's cute."

"I think the neighbors probably heard us."

"Ah, the joys of duplex life. Oh, well, it's almost time to be up anyway." Kyle sat up and smacked him lightly on the stomach. "Come on, cowboy. Shower. And then you've got to help me change these sheets." That was basically the opposite of everything Warren wanted: he wanted to curl up in this bed that smelled like their fucking and go to sleep surrounded by it. But by human standards that was a little disgusting, and Kyle wouldn't let him do it, so he grumbled a bit but got up and followed him into the bathroom, thinking vaguely hopeful thoughts about a second round in the shower.

***

Kyle got to Warren's house late, having lost track of time at the office again, and the two cars already in the driveway when he pulled up told their own story: Mercy's Rabbit and Warren's truck, with the hood up. There was a bag from Auto Zone on the ground with what looked to be the truck's old battery on top of it, and as he got out of the car he heard Mercy asking, "How have you lived this long without knowing _anything_ about cars?"

"Hard work and dedication," Warren drawled, and Kyle smirked. He was pretty sure that was the same reply Warren had given when he'd asked him how he'd gotten to be so spectacularly good at sucking cock, although admittedly his memory was a little fuzzy around then.

"That's not a German car," he pointed out as he walked up, just as Mercy closed the hood.

"Isn't it?" Warren asked, all innocence, and Mercy rolled her eyes.

"Hopeless," Kyle told him, then asked Mercy, "What's the verdict, Doc? Will she live?"

"Yeah, the leads to the battery were just corroded. Easy fix."

Kyle nodded sagely and told her, "You're a good friend." Then he told Warren, "You can fix that temporarily with Diet Coke." As for fixing it permanently, he was as lost as Warren, but he wasn't about to admit that.

"See, Kyle knows things," Mercy told Warren. He had learned that trick from a security guard when his car had refused to start outside the law library. It had been finals week and he had _not_ been handling the situation well. He'd forgotten half of what he'd learned that semester by now—that had been when he was still planning on going into business law like his parents expected; most of those classes had quickly become obsolete as far as he was concerned—but he remembered the Diet Coke trick.

Warren looked at them both bemusedly. "How the hell are you supposed to fix a car with—you know what, I don't want to know."

"You can't live in total ignorance forever," Mercy grumped.

"Watch me."

"I bet you pay someone to change your oil, don't you?" Kyle paid someone to change his oil, but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. Anyway, the Jag had sensors and things that would intimidate any reasonable civilian.

"Last few years, I just make helpless noises at you a few times until it gets taken care of, and then I buy you pizza. Works like a charm. I really should send Charles a thank you card. Speaking of, what do you want on your pizza?"

Mercy, though, was startled. "You know Charles? I didn't know you knew Charles."

"We've met a time or two," Warren said, oddly inscrutable. "Just crossing paths. I wouldn't exactly call us friends or anything."

"Sure," Mercy said, relaxing. "I'm not sure Charles has friends."

Well, Kyle thought, that was a bit harsh. "Who's Charles?" he had to ask.

"He was the guy who first taught me about cars," Mercy explained.

"After she ran his father's Porsche into a tree," Warren added, steadfastly ignoring the look Mercy shot him.

Mercy confirmed that, "It was my punishment." Maybe that explained her attitude about Charles having friends: teenage resentment carrying over.

"Oh," Kyle said, delighted. "There's a story here."

"I'll tell you about the Porsche over the pizza, how about that?" Mercy asked, resigned to her fate.

Kyle went upstairs to change out of his suit, and as he came back down he heard Mercy tell Warren, "Just tell him no."

"You know that's not an option."

"This is getting ridiculous."

"I don't know if you've noticed, but it's been ridiculous for a while," Warren said, about as annoyed as Kyle thought he'd ever heard him. When he entered the living room, Mercy was sitting on the floor, going through the box of DVDs that had made their way over from Kyle's house, and Warren was still holding his phone, his expression smoothing out when he saw Kyle. "Hey," he said. "I might have to go in to work early."

Kyle wondered if he'd considered looking for another job, one with slightly more reliable coworkers, or at least a boss that didn't keep yanking his chain. But he knew Warren well enough to know that wouldn't be a welcome suggestion—man had to have his pride, after all—so he didn't make it.

For the most part, the night shift thing worked out okay. It meant Warren usually left for work when Kyle was going to bed, and got home when Kyle was getting ready for work. While Kyle worked, Warren slept, and then their free time more or less lined up, especially when Kyle managed to drag himself out of the office at a reasonable time. Warren was pretty good incentive for that. It had complicated things for a while, made staying over after a date kind of a pain in the ass, but they'd found their rhythm, and it made the times Kyle got to actually fall asleep beside Warren and wake up with him still there all the sweeter.

Mercy held up _King Arthur_ , one eyebrow raised, and Kyle said in his own defense, "Ioan Gruffudd is a treasure."

"Ioan Gruffudd," Mercy corrected his pronunciation absently, already digging through the box again. Kyle blinked at her in consternation.

"Mercy speaks Welsh," Warren said, which explained nothing and only created considerably more questions.

"Mercy speaks like five words of Welsh. Ten at the outside," Mercy said. "But I've got a pretty good grip on the phonics of it. There was this guy in the town where I grew up," she explained to Kyle.

"There was a _guy_ ," Kyle repeated, raising his eyebrows at her.

"Not like that." Warren coughed something that sounded like 'liar' and Mercy blushed faintly. "That was a _different_ guy. Anyway, he was Welsh. He was the one who owned the Porsche, actually."

"So did you learn your ten words of Welsh from his son while learning how to change a spark plug? Are they all swear words?" Kyle asked hopefully. Most importantly: "Can and will you teach me to swear in Welsh?"

"At least half of them are swear words," Mercy confirmed, "although I'm not sure what they literally translate into. I swear much more effectively in German."

Kyle had thought of another question. "How'd a Welshman with a Porsche end up in the back end of Montana?" He knew very little about Mercy's background, but he knew that much. He realized, when he thought about it, that this meant Warren had known someone else from Mercy's tiny back end of Montana town before he met her—what were the odds of that, really? But stranger things happened all the time, he supposed.

"Long story," was all she'd say. Kyle suspected it of being code for, 'It never occurred to teenage me to ask.'

"Good hunting out there," Warren added, which was probably the real answer, and might even have something to do with how he knew the Welsh guy's son. He'd never mentioned Montana before, but a few times he'd said things that implied he'd done quite a bit of traveling between Texas and Washington. Montana could've easily fit in there somewhere.

"Right," Kyle said. "Well, _Ioan Gruffudd_ ," and he was careful to use her pronunciation, "is a treasure, and he and Clive Owen have excellent sexual tension in that movie, so it's a winner in my book."

Mercy hummed speculatively. "All right, what the heck, it might be funny," she decided.

"That's the spirit," Kyle told her.

Warren stayed for the pizza, but left before the movie really got good, well before he usually would have headed out for work. After he'd gone, Mercy said, "Heard you're moving in."

"I more or less already have," Kyle pointed out. Warren had left them in his house to watch a movie without him, after all—a movie that belonged to Kyle in the first place. "It's becoming official, though, yeah. I tried to get him to move in to my place, but he wouldn't have it. He's territorial." Mercy looked over at him, startled, like she didn't think Kyle was observant enough to have noticed that about the guy he'd been with for several months now. It stung, but he didn't call her on it—honestly, he was starting to wish he was _less_ observant about some things when it came to Warren—just said, "I figure I'll try again next summer, when a really good heat wave hits and I can play the trump card of, 'I have a house that's just sitting there empty with air conditioning. And a pool.'"

"Warren can't swim," Mercy pointed out. "So the pool isn't as much of a draw."

"It has a shallow end."

"There is that."

"And if that doesn't work I can always rent my place out," Kyle added with a shrug, "although I fear my hypothetical tenants could never appreciate Dick and Jane the way they deserve."

Mercy laughed at that, then redirected her attention to the movie, where Keira Knightley was running around in barely anything in the snow. "Shouldn't she have frostbite by now?"

"Maybe we're supposed to infer that she's part fae or something," Kyle said. "Or maybe costuming was just really bad at this. You know. One of those." Something occurred to him then, and he asked, "How did you know Warren can't swim?"

"I mean, I've known Warren for a while now," Mercy said after a moment. "It came up at some point."

"Hmm." He'd known that, that they'd been friends for a long time. He wasn't clear on how they'd met, but he assumed it had something to do with the convenience store where Warren worked being the only place anywhere near Mercy's trailer to buy anything at 3 AM. "It's just. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like he never tells me anything."

"You knew he couldn't swim, surely," Mercy protested.

"Yeah," he agreed, because he'd tried to get Warren into a bathing suit and his pool back before the weather cooled off and they basically stopped spending time at his house. The bathing suit had been the most important part of his plan there, anyway. "Just...in general."

"I think it's just the way he is," Mercy said, a little uneasy. Kyle knew she wasn't great at relationship stuff, and didn't need his dumped on her, but hell, who else was he going to dump it on? "He doesn't like to talk about the past much."

"That's true," Kyle agreed. "I guess I can't blame him for that." He didn't talk about his past much, either. He'd left it on the East Coast, the same way Warren had left his in Texas, he supposed. He should be able to respect that. But something kept bothering him.

***

Warren let himself be annoyed for the entire trip to the airport. It wasn't a big deal, exactly, picking up a new pack member, but Adam would've done it himself if he hadn't gotten tied up in a last minute meeting with some government types who couldn't be put off. It should've been Darryl's responsibility, just as a sign of respect, except this wolf was coming to them in disgrace and Darryl had wanted to see if Warren would dare say, 'Shouldn't that be your job?' and give him an excuse to smack him down.

 _Years_ he'd been in this pack now, and Darryl still didn't trust him. It galled. Paul and his bunch, whatever, they could be that way, but Darryl's sheer refusal to see that Warren was no threat to his position and sure as hell no threat to Adam's was just...well, as Mercy had said, it was ridiculous. Darryl should know better. He was certainly smart enough. But there really wasn't anything Warren could do about it.

He took a few minutes in the parking lot to calm down, and while he was doing that it occurred to him that he had a problem. Ben Shaw was, from what they'd been told while Adam was trying to decide whether or not to agree to Bran's request to take him off London's hands, not the most pleasant person to be around on a good day. Being effectively exiled from his homeland and shipped across an ocean and a continent in a metal tube with a bunch of humans did not, by anyone's standards, qualify as a good day. Warren didn't mind it so much: the man was entitled to be ill about the whole affair. But leaving him alone at Adam's house when he went to work didn't seem like the greatest idea, and leaving him at Adam's house with whoever happened to be hanging around had the potential to be a real disaster.

At least Jesse was at her mother's, he supposed.

Darryl wouldn't appreciate him making this situation his problem again. Warren considered his other options, then called George, opening with, "Are you on shift tonight?"

"No," George said. "Why?" There was no beating around the bush with George. Warren liked that about him.

"Adam got tied up at work, so I'm picking up Ben Shaw from the airport."

"Where's Darryl?"

Warren considered and discarded a few responses as insufficiently diplomatic before finally settling on simply, "He told me to do it. I have to get to work after this, and somebody needs to be at the house with Shaw at least until he goes down from jet lag."

George, as a law enforcement official and therefore one of the people with the most to lose if association with Ben Shaw blew up on them, had been in the loop on the situation from right after the Marrok had approached Adam about him, plus he'd been a Marine and was about as fazed by dirty language as your average rock, and Ben Shaw, they already knew, had one more mouth on him. "Yeah, sure," he said. "Just let me put on real pants and I'll head out there," because the third point in his favor was that George was one hundred percent dependable.

"I'll owe you one," Warren promised. He was owing a lot of people today. At least Mercy took payment in pizza.

It was easy to find Ben Shaw, and would've been even if he hadn't seen a photo and couldn't have sniffed him out in the crowd. 'Stressed to the point of barely holding on to humanity by my fingertips' was a pretty distinctive look if you knew what to look for, even without the fact that the Brit was the only person in the airport wearing sunglasses indoors and at night. "Ben Shaw?" he asked, just to be sure.

"Yeah," Ben said. "Who wants to know?" Warren was no expert at British accents, but he'd watched a bit of Masterpiece Theater in his day, enough that the crisp precision of Ben's surprised him a little. No one had mentioned he was upper crust; everything they'd heard from his old Alpha made him out to be basically a hooligan. Maybe it was like Warren's accent: exhaustion dragging out the real one instead of the one he chose to present to the world. Something to figure out later. Ben didn't risk taking off the sunglasses—probably hadn't reliably had human eyes since immigration control in Seattle at the latest, Warren thought with sympathy—so they could skip the staring contest, at least.

"Warren Smith," Warren said warmly, offering his hand. "Third in the Columbia Basin Pack. Our Alpha got hung up at work. Welcome to the Tri-Cities."

"The fuck kind of name is that?" Ben asked, but he shook Warren's hand as he said it.

Warren grinned. "You know, I think every member of our pack has asked that exact question at some point. Including the ones who'd tell you they don't swear."

"No, really, the fuck kind of name is that, no one in London would explain it." So Warren explained about the Tri-Cities, and how really, the name was increasingly inaccurate, as they waited for Ben's luggage, and Ben at least looked like he was listening, although who could tell after that many hours in transit. He seemed to be settling a little, exhaustion winning out over stress, and maybe, just a little, recognizing that he was secure in the presence of a much more dominant wolf, even if they weren’t officially pack yet.

"Did you ship anything?" he thought to ask, just as the conveyor belt started.

Ben shook his head. "Nothing worth it. I figure I can always get new furniture at Ikea."

Ah. About that. "We don't...have an Ikea here." Ben looked over his shoulder at him, his expression caught between horror and confusion. Coming from Europe, Warren supposed it was an understandable shock. "In Washington. I hear they might get one in Seattle eventually, though," he felt compelled to add, like that would help.

"Where do you get your bloody furniture, then?"

"Places other than Ikea."

Ben muttered, "They've sent me to the fucking wastelands," under his breath, but not quiet enough to be missed by werewolf ears, and then stepped forward to haul one of his bags off the belt. Warren wondered what he'd say if he told him the local vampires all would share in his sentiments.

They were in his truck, having obtained fast food for Ben and headed toward Adam's, when Ben said suddenly, "You're the queer one, right?"

There was no judgment in it, and actually very little curiosity. And it was certainly not the worst word Ben could have used. It was just a question. So Warren just said, "Right."

Ben nodded thoughtfully, gazing out the window at the night. Warren wondered what he was making of his first glimpses of his new home. It wasn't London, that was for sure. "One of the guys back ho—in London said that, that there was a—gay man in Columbia Basin. I just remembered he said your name. I thought he was having me on," Ben admitted, scrubbing one hand over his eyes. Because what the hell kind of pack would take on a gay werewolf, Warren thought.

"Well, here I am," he said, because he had to say something.

"Here you are," Ben agreed. He sounded bone-weary in more ways than one. "And here I am."

He'd do, Warren thought. Tomorrow he might be a nightmare, and most of the days after, and they'd deal with that, but Warren felt like he'd gotten a pretty good look at the stripped down bones of him while he was too tired to put up any kind of front, and he'd do. He told Adam that when he dropped in at the store early in the morning for bread and coffee they both knew was well below both his standards and the coffee available in his own house, just for an excuse to check in. Well. Maybe he actually needed the bread. Adam nodded, took a sip of his coffee, and looked like he regretted it. _Snob_ , Warren thought fondly. "That's what George said, too. I trust both of your judgment. I'm taking the day off, anyway. You'll be there tonight?" For the barbecue and ceremony officially welcoming Ben into the pack, he meant.

"Of course," Warren said, and then called after Adam as he left the store, "We both know you're going to pour that out first thing!" Adam just laughed.

He didn't ask why Warren had picked Ben up and not Darryl, which was good. Adam knew the score as well as Warren did.

He thought again about that time in Peter's barn, when Honey had told him about how Paul had challenged George while he was injured. "Adam's never quite forgiven him for that stunt," she'd said.

"And I know George hasn't," Warren had said. He'd noticed the arctic chill between Paul and George pretty early on. It was hard to miss. It was probably good they had Henry between them now as a cushion, or things would've been even more fractious around the top of the pack.

"Well, there are a few reasons they're like that. But it's definitely one of them." And then she'd said, slow and thoughtful, "Darryl, now. Darryl's one where his wolf might be stupider than him."

Warren remembered looking up and meeting her eyes, just for a second over Sesame's back, and knowing that somehow she knew: that 'third in the pack' wasn't as simple as where he stood, it was a choice he had to make every day, that every time Darryl talked down to him, didn't trust him, treated him like his errand boy or the dirt under his boots he had to force his wolf down, had to remind it he had to accept the way things stood, because the pack wouldn't have him as second, and he couldn't go back to being alone. And then she'd looked back to the bridle she was cleaning, casual as anything, and said, "Darryl has no concept of what Adam did for you. Darryl's never been outside a pack. He's a genius, sure, but his wolf is young and shortsighted."

"He'll buy a clue and settle down eventually," Peter agreed. "You just have to be patient. I know you can do that."

That was true. Warren had always been patient, if nothing else. But right now, with Kyle starting to get suspicious and Warren and his wolf both choking on _I'm going to lose him_ , it was so damned hard.

Kyle was already gone when Warren got home after his shift finally ended, either to hit the gym before work or, knowing him, work before work, but the bed still smelled like him, so that—well, it sure wasn't nothing.

***

Of two things, to quote a book he would go to his grave swearing never to have read a page of, Kyle was absolutely certain.

One, he was crazy in love with Warren Smith.

Two, something was going on, something major, and had been since before Kyle met him. And Warren was lying through his teeth about it.

He had two basic theories. The first was that Warren was fae. There was solid evidence behind it: Warren was crazy fit and stronger than his frame suggested, but never seemed to work out, and didn't work manual labor any more. He always seemed to know someone was at the door, and often who it was, before they even knocked. Kyle was about ninety percent certain he'd seen him cut himself with a kitchen knife once, and then the wound was gone before he even went to run water over it. But there was the big flaw in the theory: it had been a standard steel kitchen knife, like who knew how many other iron-containing items Kyle had watched Warren handle with no trouble. And there was Darryl Zao, who was almost certainly involved in it or else Kyle couldn't imagine why Warren put up with him. Sure, the fae could look like anything they wanted to, but they were all European in origin and, from what Kyle knew, tended toward a certain snobbish kind of racism enough that most of them wouldn't have deliberately chosen to look like a half-African, half-Chinese man, no matter how beautiful the result.

His second theory was that it involved drugs. He'd seen _Breaking Bad_. Sure, Darryl was a physicist, not a chemist, but still. It explained the weird phone calls in the middle of the night, how Warren would drop whatever he was doing or climb out of bed to leave when one came, like someone was yanking on his leash.

He also entertained the possibility that Warren was fae _and_ dealing meth, but that didn't really track. If the fae were making magic meth, Kyle would be seeing overdramatic special reports on the news about it by now, and said fae would be making _bank_ , not working nights at a gas station and living a commensurately frugal lifestyle. He'd also at one point had some sort of vague idea about espionage, but he was pretty sure that was even more fanciful on the part of his brain than 'fae drug dealers.'

At least he knew Warren didn't sparkle, so he could rule that out.

If Warren was fae, then Kyle understood why he might be in the closet, but it hurt that he didn't think he could trust Kyle with it. He thought he could forgive him, if Warren would just _tell_ him already. If it was drugs, then they were fucking done. If it was something besides those two things, then he couldn’t even figure out what it might be to think about what he would do about it.

At least he could say he felt pretty certain Warren wasn't cheating on him. He knew all the signs, and it wasn't that. So that was something.

There was one night when he couldn't sleep, when Warren had left in the middle of dinner, grumbling, and come back in at around three in the morning. After he'd gone to sleep Kyle had sat up beside him and looked down at him in the faint light from the half moon coming in through the window, thinking, _Tell me. Don't tell me. I have to know, but I don't want to._ Something had to give.

"You okay?" Warren asked, and Kyle realized he'd drifted off into worrying about it again in the middle of the movie they were watching.

"Mm-hmm. Just woolgathering. I just realized I don’t know. Do you like pumpkin pie or are you a sweet potato guy?" Thanksgiving was coming up next week. It would be their first major holiday together as a couple, and they'd decided to spend it together, just the two of them, rather than accepting any of the various invitations they'd gotten separately and jointly. It would be a milestone. Maybe Warren would tell him what was going on then.

Warren made a face. "I have never liked sweet potato anything. I am a disgrace to the state of Texas. I'll eat it if it's what's available, but don't expect me to be happy about it."

"Noted, and good, because I've never made a sweet potato pie and I was a little scared to try now."

"You don't have to win me with your pie," Warren told him. "You already have me." He ducked his head and kissed him, and Kyle thought, _Please, please let me keep him._

***  


Warren didn't have Mercy's ear for cars, but he knew Kyle's Jag, and his heart leapt into his throat when he heard it pull into the driveway. He'd texted Kyle earlier, _Can we talk?_ not knowing how else to open the conversation.

Kyle had replied, _I don't know, can we?_ which was fair and had him wincing, and then, a few minutes later, _Let me know when I can come by to pick up some of my stuff,_ which was even worse. Warren had told him any time was fine, and now here he was, with Warren still trying to piece his house and his life back together.

He was sitting on the floor surrounded by his books, trying to get them back in order, and he fought down the urge to stand, to meet Kyle on his feet. This wasn't a fight. He was in the wrong. It was right to keep his head below Kyle's, the wolf insisted.

Kyle's key turned in the lock, and then he was stepping inside, walking down the hall to the living room and then just standing in the doorway and staring. "What the hell happened here?"

Warren swallowed, dry, feeling the click in his throat, and told him the truth. "Darryl and I had about half of that fight that's been coming since, oh, thirty seconds after I met him."

Kyle stared at him until Warren dropped his eyes rather than let it become a thing. "Who won?"

"Samuel Cornick, technically. It's fine. Darryl and I understand each other now."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

Kyle nodded, slow, like he was trying to make that make sense, and then quite suddenly he asked, blurting it out, "Are you really from Texas?"

Warren had to boggle at him. "Why--why would I lie about that?"

"I don't know," Kyle said, all sharp edges. "You lied about being _human_."

"I never said I was—"

"You are not," he cut in, "going to argue semantics with a fucking _lawyer_."

"No," Warren agreed. That was fair. "Okay, no. Yes, I'm really from Texas. Yes, I really used to be a cowboy. My name is even actually Smith, since I figure you're gonna get around to doubting that sooner or later. I don't—I don't know what else you want me to say. I'm sorry. I wish I could have told you. I would have told you a hundred times over. But they would have killed you, so...I couldn't."

"Mercy said. That was the only reason why?"

"That was the only reason," Warren said readily. "I swear to you, Kyle. I would have told you a long time ago if I could have."

"I might believe you more if you'd look me in the eye while you said it, you know."

Warren's gaze jerked up to him, then, meeting his eyes properly because that was what Kyle wanted. Kyle looked back, bold and unafraid. Warren could only hold his eyes for a moment before he dropped his gaze again, because he and his wolf both knew they were in the wrong. "That's not—that's not how we work," Warren said. He'd never had to explain this before. He barely knew how to talk about it. About _any_ of it.

"What?"

"We don't—werewolves don't look people in the eye. If you do that, the wolf thinks you're trying to establish dominance over them. So we don't. And a human might notice if your eyes are the wrong color. That happens, too."

Kyle's shoulders slumped with understanding. Of course he'd noticed before just now that Warren never met anyone's eyes unless it was on purpose. "I just thought maybe you were a little bit...I don't know, on the spectrum or something. Even if nothing else fit that."

"No. Not that. I don't know what Mercy told you--"

"Not a lot," Kyle admitted. "She was focused mostly on the 'death sentence' thing and how capable your friends are of carrying it out."

"That's not going to happen," Warren assured him.

"Because it was Mercy, and Mercy's not a werewolf." Kyle sounded like he was still dubious about the logic of that. That was fair, because it was only about half accurate, from where Warren saw it. Mercy probably thought it was correct, but Mercy was missing key information about herself that most of the werewolves in North America, if not the world, had cottoned to by the time of The Great Peanut Butter Incident at the absolute latest.

"Yes, and because I think she might be Bran Cornick's favorite child, but don't tell her I said that, I don't think she has a clue." If Warren had had any doubt left after Mercy had survived, among other things even gay lone wolves had heard about, said peanut butter incident, the first time a problem had come up in the Tri-Cities after she had moved here, Bran hadn’t just had it taken care of, he’d relocated the second most powerful Alpha in North America, one of his most reliable men with one of his steadiest packs, and not just into what had been a no-wolf’s-land between Seattle and Aspen Creek, but onto the lot behind Mercy’s trailer. Mercy claimed the Marrok didn’t even like her that much, but actions spoke a hell of a lot louder than words.

"You're not making sense again." Warren opened his mouth to explain, and Kyle held up a hand to stop him. "I think—okay. I think I don't even know what I want to know yet. What the right questions are. And I think you don't know what I know, so you don't know what I still absolutely need to know. So you probably need to talk to Mercy about that, because I don't even know where to start. And then maybe on Monday we can meet for dinner, and talk about this, and we can see where we go from there. Okay?"

"Okay," Warren agreed, because he could do nothing else. He didn't know if Kyle even knew werewolves were immortal yet, and either way eventually he was going to have to tell him how old he was, how much of his background had been a lie, and then Kyle was going to hit the roof. He didn't know if they could salvage this. But he damned well meant to try, and it sounded like Kyle did, too. It was hope. It was better than nothing.

"Right now, I need to get some of my things. I can't—I'm sorry, I just need some space. To process."

"Of course," Warren agreed. Kyle hesitated, like he wanted to say something else, but then, at a loss for words for once, turned and went upstairs without another word. Warren went back to sorting his books, because there wasn't anything else he could do. Kyle came back downstairs in ten minutes or so, carrying a bag, and he hesitated in the doorway. Warren said the only thing he could: "I love you."

"I know," Kyle said. "I love you, too. I just..." he trailed off, and Warren's heart cracked open. "I'll see you on Monday." And then he was gone, but at the very least, they would have Monday, and then...and then they would see.


End file.
